AT&T Business tapped Cisco to power a “quantum resilient” SD-WAN service that the carrier plans to launch later this year, a move highlighting growing interest in protecting network infrastructure from potential quantum-related cybersecurity threats.

The as-named Quantum Resilient SD-WAN service will offer post-quantum cryptology (PQC) running on Cisco’s 8000 Series Secure Router platform. This platform will provide quantum resilient encryption, authentication, and secure boot capabilities, with PQC adhering to National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) standards.

The service will be available through AT&T Business’s broader SD-WAN portfolio and offered to customers worldwide.

“As enterprises make long-term decisions about how their networks will support increasingly sensitive data, quantum-related risk can no longer be treated as a distant concern," Joe Petrocelli, VP of communication services at AT&T Business, noted in a statement. "By integrating post-quantum cryptography into our SD‑WAN offerings, we’re helping customers reduce their risk exposure and protect critical information for the future. Our continued collaboration with Cisco allows us to deliver business-grade connectivity that evolves alongside the security needs of highly regulated industries."

The latest PQC announcement builds on long-standing SD-WAN-related work between AT&T and Cisco. This includes the expansion of integrated security service edge (SSE) features within AT&T’s SD-WAN portfolio that elevated AT&T to being the first North American service provider offering Cisco’s single-vendor secure access service edge (SASE) platform.

Dell’Oro Group earlier this year forecast that cumulative SASE spending across SSE and SD-WAN will reach $97 billion between 2025 and 2030, a level of spending three-times larger than what was spent on SASE during the first half of this decade.

The report added that SD-WAN “is evolving into the execution layer for enterprise security policy, determining how traffic is routed to cloud-delivered controls and where enforcement occurs. As security decisions move upstream, SD-WAN selection is increasingly influenced by its ability to align routing, performance, and visibility with centralized policy requirements.”

AT&T did note that planned PQC launch will be the first by a “major North American service provider,” obviously aware of a similar announcement by France’s Orange Business earlier this year. That service, which is expected to launch during the third quarter as part of Orange’s Quantum Defender suite, with all core routing traffic running on Cisco’s 8000-series routers and delivered over a standard multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) network architecture.

“We thought their plans and their portfolio was, let's call it, ‘the most mature’ at the moment,” Frank de Jong, program director of quantum safe networks at Orange, told SDxCentral about its work with Cisco. “Of course, we wanted to do it with all our suppliers, but, you know, we do not have the resources to do everything at the same time.”

Cisco’s quantum quest

The carrier deals highlight Cisco’s ongoing quantum-related efforts.

Kevin Wollenweber, SVP and GM for data center and internet infrastructure at Cisco, recently told SDxCentral in an exclusive interview that while quantum technology is still evolving, the vendor was very much focused on the PQC environment. This is especially important as concerns increase over so-called “harvest-now, decrypt-later attacks” where data intercepted today could be decrypted in the future once quantum computing becomes readily available.

“So, thinking about, what do we do and what do we implement in our platforms today that kind of prepare us and secure us from that post-quantum world, because the concern is all the attacks where people are just storing and they'll decrypt later, that's something we need to make sure we protect against,” Wollenweber said.

Cisco last month unveiled a prototype quantum switch designed to route and convert quantum information between systems built on different encoding approaches, a step toward more interoperable quantum networks. The company positions the technology as part of a broader push toward distributed quantum computing, where multiple quantum systems are networked together rather than operating as isolated machines.

Cisco has also been very busy with quantum-related networking, including a recent partnership with Atom Computing to research the use of quantum networks to link neutral-atom quantum computers in support of distributed computing models, and recent work with Qunnect where it provided enterprise-grade orchestration software operating across Qunnect’s deployed telecom fiber running under New York City.